Not for sale

The first thing Amara Osei did every morning was stand at her kitchen window and look at Toronto like it owed her something.

It kind of did.

From her apartment on the fourth floor of a Liberty Village walkup, the city stretched out in layers — the silver threads of the streetcar lines, the construction cranes that never seemed to finish anything, the CN Tower standing in the distance like it had something to prove. October had arrived the way it always did in Toronto: without mercy. The sky was the specific shade of grey that meant the sun had simply decided not to bother, and the wind off Lake Ontario had teeth.

Amara didn’t mind. She liked the city better when it was honest.

She wrapped both hands around her mug and let the warmth settle into her palms. The apartment smelled the way it always did — shea butter, cedar, and something faintly floral from the frankincense oil she’d been testing in the latest batch. Plants lined the windowsill: three succulents, a monstera that had overtaken the corner like a small revolution, a trailing pothos she’d named Gerald for reasons she could no longer explain.

This was her life. She had built it herself, piece by piece, and she was not in the habit of taking that lightly.

— ✦ —

Rooted had started on this same kitchen counter three years ago.

Not as a business — not yet. It had started as something she did on weekends to feel close to her grandmother, mixing shea butter with rosehip oil and calendula the way her grandmother had shown her in Accra when Amara was nine years old. Her grandmother had called skin a map. “The way you care for it,” she’d said, pressing her old hands over Amara’s young ones, “tells everyone where you have been, and where you intend to go.”

Amara had written that down in a notebook. Years later, she’d put it on her website.

Now Rooted had a small studio-workshop two streets over, two part-time employees — Joy, who was twenty-two and learning everything fast, and Mr. Adeyemi, who was sixty and knew everything already and made sure everyone knew that too — and a growing list of stockists across Ontario. It wasn’t Reid & Harlow money. It wasn’t even close. But it was hers, completely and without asterisk, and that meant more than she had words for.

She set her mug down and pulled up the day’s task list on her phone.

New batch formulation. Stockist meeting at 2pm. Call Mum.

That last one had been on the list for four days. She moved it to the top.

— ✦ —

“I need you to tell me if this smells like a grandmother’s house or a spa,” Amara said, holding a small glass jar under Dami’s nose the moment she walked through the door.

Dami Fashola dropped her oversized tote bag on the floor, shrugged off her coat, took the jar, sniffed it with the gravity of a professional perfumer, and said: “Both. Simultaneously. It’s giving ancestral healing and also expensive vacation. That’s a ten out of ten, babe.”

“You say that about everything.”

“Because everything you make deserves it.” Dami threw herself onto the couch with the energy of someone who had been standing for twelve hours, despite the fact that Amara knew for certain she had worked from home today. “Also, hi. I had a day.”

“What kind?”

“The kind where three clients email me revisions on the same deck within six minutes of each other, and then one of them replies all to say —” she paused for dramatic effect — “‘great thinking, team.’ I am not your team. I am a consultant. There is a difference. I have slides about the difference.”

Amara poured a second cup of tea without being asked. This was the rhythm of them — ten years of friendship distilled into motion, into the particular shorthand of two people who had watched each other fail and start over and fail again and refuse to stop.

“Biscuit knocked my laptop off the desk again,” Dami added.

“That cat is trying to tell you something.”

“He’s telling me he wants premium wet food and I am refusing to negotiate with terrorists.” She accepted the mug. “How was your day? Tell me something good.”

Amara leaned against the counter. “New batch of the night cream is ready for testing. Joy figured out the emulsification issue.”

“Joy is a genius.”

“Joy is twenty-two and already better than me at three things. It’s annoying and wonderful.” Amara smiled. “Also, Mr. Adeyemi told her she had ‘acceptable instincts’ today, which from him is basically a standing ovation.”

Dami laughed — the kind that came from the stomach — and Amara felt the day settle properly around her.

This was enough. This was good. She had stopped needing things to be more than good a long time ago.

— ✦ —

Her mother called at seven, as she always did when Amara called her first — thirty minutes late and completely unbothered by it.

“You look thin,” her mother said, squinting at the phone screen.

“Mum, this is a voice call.”

“I can tell from your voice. Are you eating?”

“I had jollof for lunch.”

“From where?”

“I made it.”

A pause that communicated an entire essay of scepticism. “How was it?”

“...It was fine.”

“Come home on Saturday. I’ll make it properly.”

Amara’s mother, Grace Osei, lived in the same house in Scarborough where Amara had grown up — a semi-detached on a quiet street that had been both a sanctuary and the site of some of the hardest years of their lives. The debt had taken almost everything. The scandal had taken what was left. But Grace had stayed in that house as an act of something Amara could only describe as stubborn dignity, and she had slowly, carefully rebuilt a life inside it.

Amara had learned everything from her mother. She just hadn’t told her that enough.

“Saturday,” she agreed. “I’ll bring the new night cream.”

“Bring food,” her mother said. “Bring yourself. The rest is extra.”

After she hung up, Amara stood in her quiet apartment and listened to the city outside her window — the distant horn of a streetcar, the wind, the ordinary music of a Thursday evening in Toronto — and felt something she had learned to sit with without needing to name it.

She was okay. She had worked hard to become okay. And tomorrow she would work hard to become something even better than that.

That was enough. That was everything.